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Andrew Cassel and Dan Rottenberg

the breakfast table
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from: Dan Rottenberg

Those Clueless World Leaders

Posted Thursday, March 8, 2001, at 1:29 PM ET

Andy,

As that font of erudition, William F. Buckley, so eloquently put it to his fellow TV panelist, Gore Vidal, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddam face." Andy, why must you be so reasonable and intelligent? Why do you keep resisting my efforts to provoke you into a verbal fistfight? How do you ever expect the Eagles to hire you at middle linebacker if you don't get mad once in a while?

Let me suggest another explanation for the Taliban: They're not very bright. It never ceases to amaze me how journalists so readily assign levels of virtue or evil to various national leaders, but we assume all of them possess a certain basic level of intelligence (with the exception, oddly, of George W. Bush). Thus we're constantly trying to figure out what complex master schemes are festering in the diabolical brains of Saddam Hussein or Jiang Zemin or Kim Il Jong. The notion that these guys might be largely clueless and just making it up as they go along (pretty much like the rest of us, come to think of it) never occurs to us.

Consider Yasser Arafat. Nobody can figure out his game plan. That's because, I suspect, he doesn't have one. Arafat and his advisers seem to be endowed with the courage to fight and die for a Palestinian state. But they seem utterly lacking in the wisdom and imagination necessary to create a viable state without fighting and dying. When you hear them (as well as people like Bin Laden) say that violence is the only solution to tyranny, you have to wonder: Has anybody told these people about Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Corazon Aquino, even Boris Yeltsin? Do they know that the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union, and now Milosevic all fell without a shot being fired? Hello? In a world where the effectiveness of nonviolence has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past 12 years, isn't the Palestinian leaders' insistence on violence a reflection on their own deficiencies?

Andy, I've enjoyed this exchange immensely. You seem like a bright and decent fellow. So I hope you won't take it personally when I tell you that, because you refuse to acknowledge my sagacity, I have no choice but to blow up your house and sell your wife and children into slavery. Have a nice day!

Best regards,
Dan

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Dan Rottenberg

Those Clueless World Leaders

Posted Thursday, March 8, 2001, at 1:29 PM ET
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Andrew Cassel writes a thrice-weekly column about the economy. He has been a columnist, business reporter, and national correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer since 1984. Philadelphia journalist Dan Rottenberg is a veteran of 16 years with alternative publications and the author of seven books, most recently The Inheritor's Handbook. He currently edits Family Business magazine.
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